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Obama's "infrastructure" jobs program will mainly make jobs for men.

Linda Hirshman doesn't like it. Her solution?

Fortunately, jobs for women can be created by concentrating on professions that build the most important infrastructure ? human capital. In 2007, women were 83 percent of social workers, 94 percent of child care workers, 74 percent of education, training and library workers (including 98 percent of preschool and kindergarten teachers and 92 percent of teachers? assistants)....

Many of the jobs women do are already included in Mr. Obama?s campaign promises. Women are teachers, and the campaign promised to provide support for families with children up to the age of 5, increase Head Start financing and quadruple the money spent on Early Head Start to include a quarter-million infants and toddlers. Special education, including arts education, is heavily female as well. Mr. Obama promised to increase financing for arts education and for the National Endowment for the Arts, which supports many school programs....

The current proposal is simply too narrow. Women represent almost half the work force ? not exactly a marginal special interest group. By adding a program for jobs in libraries, schools and children?s programs, the new administration can create jobs for them, too.

I think Obama must respond to this problem. If a huge federal jobs program is really what we need -- and I'm not willing to say it is -- then how can nearly all the job be men's jobs? Is it enough of an answer to say that it's up to women to take up the hard physical labor of building roads and bridges and the like?

Full post as published by Althouse on December 09, 2008 (boomark / email).